It is difficult to re-educate people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supra-national body. — Bilderberg Group founder, Prince Bernhard

The assassination of Lebanese politician Antoine Ghanem on September 19 is likely to be used, predictably, to further US and Israeli interests in the region. Most Western and some Arab media have industriously argued that Syria is the greatest beneficiary from the death of Ghanem, a member of the Phalange party responsible for much of Lebanon’s bloodshed during the civil war years between 1975 and 1990. The reasoning provided is that Syria needs to maintain a measure of political control over Lebanon after being pressured to withdraw its troops. This political clout could only be maintained through the purging of anti-Syrian critics in Lebanon, and by ensuring a Lebanese parliament friendly to Syria. And indeed, with the elimination of Ghanem, the anti-Syrian coalition at the fractious Lebanese parliament is now left with an even slimmer majority – 68 MPs in a 128-member assembly.

Case solved.

Or is it?

The Syrian regime may, in fact, be responsible for the murder of six Lebanese political figures, including Ghanem, since the tragic car-bombing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. However, to understand the situation in Lebanon, one needs to refrain from any simplistic conclusions. This is not an easy task, however, given that media reports pertaining to Lebanon classify every Lebanese political figure as ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ Syrian. Such reporting rests on the idea that the Syrian regime—and only the Syrian regime—has a keen interest in bringing death and chaos to a small but strategically important Lebanon. By the same logic, all of Syria’s allies – Iran, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and the Damascus-based Palestinian groups, including Hamas and various socialist factions – are regularly implicated by the Western media.

Considering the elaborate politics of assassination in Lebanon and the many bloody events that were justified on the basis of such killings – notwithstanding the rationalization of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and

the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 – one would assume that media reporters and commentators have learned to become extra cautious before following official American and Israeli lines.

As a country either fully or partially responsible for destabilizing Lebanon, Syria may be a probable culprit in Ghanem’s death. This is a view underscored daily by both those who are either genuinely seeking to liberate Lebanon from foreign influence and those who wish to dominate the Lebanese political landscape. But self-interested as it may be, Syria is also known for being politically savvy and judicious. It has shown this by serving as a valuable ally in the US ‘war on terror’ since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; it willingly collaborated in securing its borders with Iraq, and even went as far as torturing America’s prisoners in the CIA’s infamous ‘extraordinary renditions.’

Why would a country that was willing to sink so low now provide pretexts for hostilities by carrying out brazen assassinations against America’s allies in Lebanon? Each such assassination only helps cement the anti-Syrian cries stemming from Washington, Tel Aviv and Beirut. The Syrian regime’s past is indisputably cruel, but inanity has hardly been one of its features.

Could it be plausible that Syria is innocent of the most recent bloodletting in Lebanon? It is mind-boggling to imagine a country which has managed to survive amidst the incalculable hostility stemming from across all its borders being so foolish as to carry out such ludicrous crimes with such harmful consequences at such a critical time. Despite Lebanon’s value in the Middle East’s ongoing Cold War, Syria, like any other regime under threat, should be less concerned about dominating a smaller neighbour than in securing its own survival.

So who are the other possible culprits? Considering Lebanon’s bloodstained past and the numerous players, sects and factions operating within its borders, the list seems endless. However, taking into account the nature of the assassinations (all targeting ‘anti-Syrian’ figures) and the official line championed by the US and Israel, one can reasonably include those who wish to drive Syria into a military confrontation, or perhaps a humiliating political settlement with Israel (which Damascus has refused since its talks with Tel Aviv broke off in 2000), including a compromise on the occupied ‘Golan Heights’. It would be worth noting here the neoconservative doctrine prepared by Richard Perle in 1996 for then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tellingly entitled ‘A Clean Break: Securing the Realm,’ it outlines plans to subdue Syria through the Lebanese route. Could this help to explain why the U.S. and Israeli governments are no longer pursuing previously concerted efforts and publicly declared objectives and instead blaming Israel’s military setback in Lebanon in 2006 largely on Syria’s – and Iran’s – backing of Hizbollah?

It might also be helpful for those who insist that Syria alone is capable of inflicting such mayhem in Lebanon to remember that Netanyahu recently and unsurprisingly admitted that the ‘mysterious’ air strike inside Syrian territories on September 6 – clearly an attempt to coerce Syria into a military confrontation – was indeed deliberate. US diplomats scrambled to justify the palpable act of war on the mediocre claim that the Syrian target bombed by Israeli US-supplied F15 jets ‘may have had links to North Korean nuclear arms,’ according to the British Guardian. Mediocre or not, a case against Syria that involves the US, Israel and their allies in the region is being diligently weaved, and one should not be surprised if the next military confrontation against Hizbollah will widen to include Syrian territories as well.

As media and official efforts have conveniently overlooked all other possible culprits behind the determined efforts to destabilise Lebanon, the region seems headed for another military confrontation and Lebanon for a possible civil war. This will most likely be blamed on Syria, Iran, Hizbollah and Palestinian factions, and Israel will once again be presented as acting in self-defence and the US as defending the cause of Israel, democracy and human rights.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com

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If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.

High-tech surveillance and undercover spying on protests by the NYPD have soared — this is what happens when the “War on Terror” comes home.

One day in August, I walked into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Nearly three years before I had been locked up, about two blocks away, in “the Tombs” — the infamous jail then named the Bernard B. Kerik Complex for the now-disgraced New York City Police Commissioner. You see, I am one of the demonstrators who was illegally arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). My crime had been — in an effort to call attention to the human toll of America’s wars — to ride the subway, dressed in black with the pallor of death about me (thanks to cornstarch and cold cream), and an expression to match, sporting a placard around my neck that read: WAR DEAD.I was with a small group and our plan was to travel from Union Square to Harlem, change trains, and ride all the way back down to Astor Place. But when my small group exited the train at the 125th Street station in Harlem, we were arrested by a swarm of police, marched to a waiting paddy wagon and driven to a filthy detention center. There, we were locked away for hours in a series of razor-wire-topped pens, before being bussed to the Tombs.

Now, I was back to resolve the matter of my illegal arrest. As I walked through the metal detector of the Federal building, a security official searched my bag. He didn’t like what he found. “You could be shot for carrying that in here,” he told me. “You could be shot.”

For the moment, however, the identification of that dangerous object I attempted to slip into the federal facility will have to wait. Let me instead back up to July 2004, when, with the RNC fast-approaching, I authored an article on the militarization of Manhattan — “the transformation of the island into a ‘homeland-security state'” — and followed it up that September with a street-level recap of the convention protests, including news of the deployment of an experimental sound weapon, the Long Range Acoustic Device, by the NYPD, and the department’s use of an on-loan Fuji blimp as a “spy-in-the-sky.” Back then, I suggested that the RNC gave New York’s “finest,” a perfect opportunity to “refine, perfect, and implement new tactics (someday, perhaps, to be known as the ‘New York model’) for use penning in or squelching dissent. It offered them the chance to write up a playbook on how citizens’ legal rights and civil liberties may be abridged, constrained, and violated at their discretion.”

Little did I know how much worse it could get.

No Escape

Since then, the city’s security forces have eagerly embraced an Escape From New York-aesthetic — an urge to turn Manhattan into a walled-in fortress island under high-tech government surveillance, guarded by heavily armed security forces, with helicopters perpetually overhead. Beginning in Harlem in 2006, near the site of two new luxury condos, the NYPD set up a moveable “two-story booth tower, called Sky Watch,” that gave an “officer sitting inside a better vantage point from which to monitor the area.” The Panopticon-like structure — originally used by hunters to shoot quarry from overhead and now also utilized by the Department of Homeland Security along the Mexican border — was outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight, sensors, and four to five cameras. Now, five Sky Watch towers are in service, rotating in and out of various neighborhoods.

With their 20-25 neighborhood-scanning cameras, the towers are only a tiny fraction of the Big Apple surveillance story. Back in 1998, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that there were “2,397 cameras used by a wide variety of private businesses and government agencies throughout Manhattan” — and that was just one borough. About a year after the RNC, the group reported that a survey of just a quarter of that borough yielded a count of more than 4,000 surveillance cameras of every kind. At about the same time, military-corporate giant Lockheed Martin was awarded a $212 million contract to build a “counter-terrorist surveillance and security system for New York’s subways and commuter railroads as well as bridges and tunnels” that would increase the camera total by more than 1,000. A year later, as seems to regularly be the case with contracts involving the military-corporate complex, that contract had already ballooned to $280 million, although the system was not to be operational until at least 2008.

In 2006, according to a Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) spokesman, the MTA already had a “3,000-camera-strong surveillance system,” while the NYPD was operating “an additional 3,000 cameras” around the city. That same year, Bill Brown, a member of the Surveillance Camera Players — a group that leads surveillance-camera tours and maps their use around the city, estimated, according to a Newsweek article, that the total number of surveillance cameras in New York exceeded 15,000 — “a figure city officials say they have no way to verify because they lack a system of registry.” Recently, Brown told me that 15,000 was an estimate for the number of cameras in Manhattan, alone. For the city as a whole, he suspects the count has now reached about 40,000.

This July, NYPD officials announced plans to up the ante. By the end of 2007, according to the New York Times, they pledged to install “more than 100 cameras” to monitor “cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.” This “Ring of Steel” scheme, which has already received $10 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security (in addition to $15 million in city funds), aims to exponentially decrease privacy because, if “fully financed, it will include. … 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers” to monitor all those electronic eyes.

Spies in the Sky

At the time of the RNC, the NYPD was already mounted on police horses, bicycles, and scooters, as well as an untold number of marked and unmarked cars, vans, trucks, and armored vehicles, not to mention various types of water-craft. In 2007, the two-wheeled Segway joined its list of land vehicles.

Overhead, the NYPD aviation unit, utilizing seven helicopters, proudly claims to be “in operation 24/7, 365,” according to Deputy Inspector Joseph Gallucci, its commanding officer. Not only are all the choppers outfitted with “state of the art cameras and heat-sensing devices,” as well as “the latest mapping, tracking and surveillance technology,” but one is a “$10 million ‘stealth bird,’ which has no police markings — [so] that those on the ground have no idea they are being watched.”

Asked about concerns over intrusive spying by members of the aviation unit — characterized by Gallucci as “a bunch of big boys who like big expensive toys” — Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly scoffed. “We’re not able to, even if we wanted, to look into private spaces,” he told the New York Times. “We’re looking at public areas.” However, in 2005, it was revealed that, on the eve of the RNC protests, members of the aviation unit took a break and used their night-vision cameras to record “an intimate moment” shared by a “couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse.”

Despite this incident, which only came to light because the same tape included images that had to be turned over to a defendant in an unrelated trial, Kelly has called for more aerial surveillance. The commissioner apparently also got used to having the Fuji blimp at his disposal, though he noted that “it’s not easy to send blimps into the airspace over New York.” He then “challenged the aerospace industry to find a solution” that would, no doubt, bring the city closer to life under total surveillance.

Police Misconduct: The RNC

As a result of its long history of brutality, corruption, spying, silencing dissent, and engaging in illegal activities, the NYPD is a particularly secretive organization. As such, the full story of the department’s misconduct during the Republican National Convention has yet to be told; but, even in an era of heightened security and defensiveness, what has emerged hasn’t been pretty.

By April 2005, New York Times journalist Jim Dwyer was already reporting that, “of the 1,670 [RNC arrest] cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney’s office agreeing that the cases should be ‘adjourned in contemplation of dismissal.'” In one case that went to trial, it was found that video footage of an arrest had been doctored to bolster the NYPD’s claims. (All charges were dropped against that defendant. In 400 other RNC cases, by the spring of 2005, video recordings had either demonstrated that defendants had not committed crimes or that charges could not be proved against them.)

Since shifting to “zero-tolerance” law enforcement policies under Mayor (now Republican presidential candidate) Rudolph Giuliani, the city has been employing a system of policing where arrests are used to punish people who have been convicted of no crime whatsoever, including, as at the RNC or the city’s monthly Critical Mass bike rides, those who engage in any form of protest. Prior to the Giuliani era, about half of all those “arrested for low-level offenses would get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court.” Now the proportion is 10%. (NYPD documents show that the decision to arrest protesters, not issue summonses, was part of the planning process prior to the RNC.)

Speaking at the 2007 meeting of the American Sociological Association, Michael P. Jacobson, Giuliani’s probation and correction commissioner, outlined how the city’s policy of punishing the presumed innocent works:

“Essentially, everyone who’s arrested in New York City, in the parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through ‘the system’. … if you’ve never gone through the system, even 24 hours — that’s a shocking period of punishment. It’s debasing, it’s difficult. You’re probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet paper. You’re given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green.”

In 2005, the Times’ Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since the time of the RNC, police officers had not only “conducted covert surveillance … of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident,” but had acted as agent provocateurs. At the RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a “sham arrest” of “a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.”

In 2006, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), reported “that hundreds of Convention protesters may have been unnecessarily and unlawfully arrested because NYPD officials failed to give adequate orders to disperse and failed to afford protesters a reasonable opportunity to disperse.”

Police Commissioner Kelly had no hesitation about rejecting the organization’s report. Still, these were strong words, considering the weakness of the source. The overall impotence of the CCRB suggests a great deal about the NYPD’s culture of unaccountability. According to an ACLU report, the board “investigates fewer than half of all complaints that it reviews, and it produces a finding on the merits in only three of ten complaints disposed of in any given year.” This inaction is no small thing, given the surge of complaints against NYPD officers in recent years. In 2001, before Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly came to power, the CCRB received 4,251 complaints. By 2006, the number of complaints had jumped by 80% to 7,669. Even more telling are the type of allegations found to be on the rise (and largely ignored). According to the ACLU, from 2005 to 2006, complaints over the use of excessive force jumped 26.8% — “nearly double the increase in complaints filed.”

It was in this context that the planning for the RNC demonstrations took place. In 2006, in five internal police reports made public as part of a lawsuit, “New York City police commanders candidly discuss[ed] how they had successfully used ‘proactive arrests,’ covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend[ed] that those approaches be employed at future gatherings.” A draft report from the department’s Disorder Control Unit had a not-so-startling recommendation, given what did happen at the RNC: “Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds.”

According to Dwyer, for at least a year prior to those demonstrations, “teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe” to conduct covert surveillance of activists. “In hundreds of reports, stamped ‘N.Y.P.D. Secret,’ [the NYPD’s] Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, [including] street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies.” Three elected city councilmen — Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook — were even cited in the reports for endorsing a protest event held on January 15, 2004 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

In August, the New York Times editorial page decried the city’s continuing attempts to keep documents outlining the police department’s spying and other covert activities secret:

“The city of New York is waging a losing and ill-conceived battle for overzealous secrecy surrounding nearly 2,000 arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention…. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly seemed to cast an awfully wide and indiscriminate net in seeking out potential troublemakers. For more than a year before the convention, members of a police spy unit headed by a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency infiltrated a wide range of groups… many of the targets … posed no danger or credible threat.”

The Times concluded that — coupled with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to disrupt and criminalize protest during the convention week — “police action helped to all but eliminate dissent from New York City during the Republican delegates’ visit. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. And civil rights denied.”

Police Commissioner Kelly had a radically different take on his department’s conduct. Earlier this year, he claimed that “the Republican National Convention was perhaps the finest hour in the history of the New York City Department.”

Police Misconduct: 2007

“Finest” might seem a funny term for the NYPD’s actions, but these days everyone’s a relativist. In the years since the RNC protests, the NYPD has been mired in scandal after scandal — from killing unarmed black men and “violations of civil rights” at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade to issuing “sweeping generalizations” that lead to “labeling almost every American Muslim as a potential terrorist.” And, believe it or not, the racial and political scandals were but a modest part of the mix. Add to them, killings, sexual assaults, kidnapping, armed robbery, burglary, corruption, theft, drug-related offenses, conspiracy — and that’s just a start when it comes to crimes members of the force have been charged with. It’s a rap sheet fit for Public Enemy #1, and we’re only talking about the story of the NYPD in the not-yet-completed year of 2007.

For example, earlier this year a 13-year NYPD veteran was “arrested on charges of hindering prosecution, tampering with evidence, obstructing governmental administration and unlawful possession of marijuana,” in connection with the shooting of another officer. In an unrelated case, two other NYPD officers were arrested and “charged with attempted kidnapping, armed robbery, armed burglary and other offenses.”

In a third case, the New York Post reported that a “veteran NYPD captain has been stripped of his badge and gun as part of a federal corruption probe that already has led to the indictment of an Internal Affairs sergeant who allegedly tipped other cops that they were being investigated.” And that isn’t the only NYPD cover-up allegation to surface of late. With cops interfering in investigations of fellow cops and offering advice on how to deflect such probes, it’s a wonder any type of wrongdoing surfaces. Yet, the level of misconduct in the department appears to be sweeping enough to be irrepressible.

For instance, sex crime scandals have embroiled numerous officers — including one “accused of sexually molesting his young stepdaughter,” who pled guilty to “a misdemeanor charge of child endangerment,” and another “at a Queens hospital charged with possessing and sharing child pornography.” In a third case, a member of the NYPD’s School Safety Division was “charged with the attempted rape and sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl.” In a fourth case, a “police officer pleaded guilty…. to a grotesque romance with an infatuated 13-year-old girl.” Meanwhile, an NYPD officer, who molested women while on duty and in uniform, was convicted of sexual abuse and official misconduct.

Cop-on-cop sexual misconduct of an extreme nature has also surfaced…. but why go on? You get the idea. And, if you don’t, there are lurid cases galore to check out, like the investigation into “whether [an] NYPD officer who fatally shot his teen lover before killing himself murdered the boyfriend of a past lover,” or the officer who was “charged with intentional murder in the shooting death of his 22-year-old girlfriend.” And don’t even get me started on the officer “facing charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit robberies of drugs and drug proceeds from narcotics traffickers.”

All of this, and much more, has emerged in spite of the classic blue-wall-of-silence. It makes you wonder: In the surveillance state to come, are we going to be herded and observed by New York’s finest lawbreakers?

It’s important to note that all of these cases have begun despite a striking NYPD culture of non-accountability. Back in August, the New York Timesnoted that the “Police Department has increasingly failed to prosecute New York City police officers on charges of misconduct when those cases have been substantiated by the independent board that investigates allegations of police abuse, officials of the board say.” Between March 1, 2007 and June 30, 2007 alone, the NYPD “declined to seek internal departmental trials against 31 officers, most of whom were facing charges of stopping people in the street without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, according to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.” An ACLU report, “Mission Failure: Civilian Review of Policing in New York City, 1994-2006,” released this month, delved into the issue in even greater detail. The organization found that, between 2000 and 2005, “the NYPD disposed of substantiated complaints against 2,462 police officers: 725 received no discipline. When discipline was imposed, it was little more than a slap on the wrist.”

Much has come to light recently about the way the U.S. military has been lowering its recruitment standards in order to meet the demands of ongoing, increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including an increase in “moral waivers” allowing more recruits with criminal records to enter the services. Well, it turns out that, on such policies, the NYPD has been a pioneering institution.

In 2002, the BBC reported that “New York’s powerful police union…. accused the police department of allowing ‘sub-standard’ recruits onto the force.” Then, just months after the RNC protests, the New York Daily News exposed the department’s practice of “hiring applicants with arrest records and shoving others through without full background checks” including those who had been “charged with laundering drug money, assault, grand larceny and weapons possession.” According to Sgt. Anthony Petroglia, who, until he retired in 2002, had worked for almost a decade in the department’s applicant-processing division, the NYPD was “hiring people to be cops who have no respect for the law.” Another retiree from the same division was blunter: “It’s all judgment calls — bad ones…. but the bosses say, ‘Send ’em through. We’ll catch the problem ones later.'”

The future looks bright, if you are an advocate of sending the force even further down this path. The new choice to mold the department of tomorrow, according to the Village Voice, the “NYPD’s new deputy commissioner of training, Wilbur ‘Bill’ Chapman, should have no trouble teaching ‘New York’s Finest’ about the pitfalls of sexual harassment, cronyism, and punitive transfers [because h]e’s been accused of all that during his checkered career.”

In the eerie afterglow of 9/11, haunted by the specter of terrorism, in an atmosphere where repressive zero-tolerance policies already rule, given the unparalleled power of Commissioner Kelly — called “the most powerful police commissioner in the city’s history” by NYPD expert Leonard Levitt — and with a police department largely unaccountable to anyone (as the only city agency without any effective outside oversight), the Escape from New York model may indeed represent Manhattan’s future.

Nick Turse v. The City of New York

So what, you might still be wondering, was it that led the security official at the federal courthouse to raise the specter of my imminent demise? A weapon? An unidentified powder? No, a digital audio recorder. “Some people here don’t want to be recorded,” he explained in response to my quizzical look.

So I checked the recording device and, accompanied by my lawyer, the indomitable Mary D. Dorman, made my way to Courtroom 18D, a stately room in the upper reaches of the building that houses the oldest district court in the nation. There, I met our legal nemesis, a city attorney whose official title is “assistant corporation counsel.” After what might pass for a cordial greeting, he asked relatively politely whether I was going to except the city’s monetary offer of $8,500 — which I had rejected the previous week– to settle my lawsuit for false arrest. As soon as I indicated I wouldn’t (as I had from the moment the city started the bidding at $2,500), any hint of cordiality fled the room. Almost immediately, he was referring to me as a “criminal” — declassified NYPD documents actually refer to me as a “perp.” Soon, he launched into a bout of remarkable bluster, threatening lengthy depositions to waste my time and monetary penalties associated with court costs that would swallow my savings.

Then, we were all directed to a small jury room off the main courtroom, where the city’s attorney hauled out a threatening prop to bolster his act — an imposingly gigantic file folder stuffed with reams of “Nick Turse” documents, including copies of some of my disreputable Tomdispatch articles as well as printouts of suspicious webpages from the American Empire Project — the obviously criminal series that will be publishing my upcoming book, The Complex.

There, the litany of vague threats to tie me down with depositions, tax me with fees, and maybe, somehow, send me to jail for a “crime” that had been dismissed years earlier continued until a federal magistrate judge entered the room. To him, the assistant corporation counsel and I told our versions of my arrest story — which turned out to vary little.

The basic details were the same. As the city attorney shifted in his seat, I told the judge how, along with compatriots I’d met only minutes before, I donned my “WAR DEAD” sign and descended into the subway surrounded by a phalanx of cops — plainclothes, regular uniformed, Big Brother-types from the Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU), and white-shirted brass, as well as a Washington Post photographer and legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild — and boarded our train. I explained that we sat there looking as dead as possible for about 111 blocks and then, as the Washington Post reported, were arrested when we came back to life and “tried to change trains.” I asked, admittedly somewhat rhetorically why, if I was such a “criminal,” none of the officers present at my arrest had actually showed up in court to testify against me when my case was dismissed out of hand back in 2004? And why hadn’t the prosecutor wanted to produce the video footage the NYPD had taken of the entire action and my arrest? And why had the city been trying to buy me off all these years since?

Faced with the fact that his intimidation tactics hadn’t worked, the city attorney now quit his bad-cop tactics and I rose again out of the ditch of “common criminality” into citizenship and then to the high status of being addressed as “Dr. Turse” (in a bow to my PhD). Offers and counteroffers followed, leading finally to a monetary settlement with a catch — I also wanted an apology. If that guard hadn’t directed me — under threat of being shot — to check my digital audio recorder at the door, I might have had a sound file of it to listen to for years to come. Instead, I had to be content with the knowledge that an appointed representative of the City of New York not only had to ditch the Escape from New York model — at least for a day — pony up some money for violating my civil rights, and, before a federal magistrate judge, also issue me an apology, on behalf of the city, for wrongs committed by the otherwise largely unaccountable NYPD.

The Future of the NYPD and the Homeland-Security State-let

I’m under no illusions that this minor monetary settlement and apology were of real significance in a city where civil rights are routinely abridged, the police are a largely unaccountable armed force, and a culture of total surveillance is increasingly the norm. But my lawsuit, when combined with those of my fellow arrestees, could perhaps have some small effect. After all, less than a year after the convention, 569 people had already “filed notices that they intended to sue the City, seeking damages totaling $859,014,421,” according to an NYCLU report. While the city will end up paying out considerably less, the grand total will not be insignificant. In fact, Jim Dwyer recently reported that the first 35 of 605 RNC cases had been settled for a total of $694,000.

If New Yorkers began to agitate for accountability — demanding, for instance, that such settlements be paid out of the NYPD’s budget — it could make a difference. Then, every time New Yorkers’ hard-earned tax-dollars were handed over to fellow citizens who were harassed, mistreated, injured, or abused by the city’s police force that would mean less money available for the “big expensive toys” that the “big boys” of the NYPD’s aviation unit use to record the private moments of unsuspecting citizens or the ubiquitous surveillance gear used not to capture the rest of the city on candid camera. It wouldn’t put an end to the NYPD’s long-running criminality or the burgeoning homeland security state-let that it’s building, but it would, at least, introduce a tiny measure of accountability.

Such an effort might even begin a dialogue about the NYPD, its dark history, its current mandate under the Global War on Terror, and its role in New York City. For instance, people might begin to examine the very nature of the department. They might conclude that questions must be raised when institutions — be they rogue regimes, deleterious industries, unaccountable corporations, or fundamentally-tainted government institutions — consistently, over many decades, evidence a persistent disregard for the law, a lack of accountability, and a deep resistance to reform. Those directly affected by the NYPD, a nearly 38,000-person force — larger than many armies — that has consistently flouted the law and has proven remarkably resistant to curtailing its own misconduct for well over a century, might even begin to wonder if it can be trusted to administer the homeland security state-let its top officials are fast implementing and, if not, what can be done about it.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in 2008. His new website NickTurse.com (up only in rudimentary form) will fully launch in the coming months.

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William from The Mac Manifesto (William Mac) explains how “The Big Drug” of entertainment addiction and blind submission to media has made the young generation sedated and complacent to the point of pure lethargy. William Mac urges his generation to wake up and take action and educate themselves instead of wasting time on the WWW.

I used to give thought to what historical time and place I would like to have lived in. Europe in the 1930s was usually my first choice. As the war clouds darkened, I’d be surrounded by intrigue, spies omnipresent, matters of life and death pressing down, the opportunity to be courageous and principled. I pictured myself helping desperate people escape to America. It was real Hollywood stuff; think “Casablanca”. And when the Spanish Republic fell to Franco and his fascist forces, aided by the German and Italian fascists (while the United States and Britain stood aside, when not actually aiding the fascists), everything in my imaginary scenario would have heightened — the fate of Europe hung in the balance. Then the Nazis marched into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland … one could have devoted one’s life to working against all this, trying to hold back the fascist tide; what could be more thrilling, more noble?

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Sunday that he supported the recent Majlis (parliament) statement to brand the U.S. army and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as terrorist groups.

“Terrorist is a proper label for the military and security forces of the United States,” Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters at his weekly press conference.

When asked about the recent approval of the U.S. House of Representative which put the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)on the list of terrorist organizations, Hosseini said “placing the armed forces of the UN member states on the list of terrorist groups is unprecedented.”

Iranian lawmakers on Saturday branded the U.S. troops and the CIA as terrorist groups, apparently a sharp reaction tit-for-tat over the decisions of their U.S. counterparts.

More than 200 Iranian MPs said in a statement that “the U.S. army and the CIA themselves are terrorists since they support terrorism.”

“They support Israel’s state terrorism in its crackdown on Palestinian and Lebanese people, trained al-Qaida and Taliban, and established secret prisons in Europe, torture prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” the MPs said.

Moreover, the Iranian MPs demanded the United Nations to intervene in the “global problem of U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret jails in other countries.”

The statement was just released three days after the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives called on the U.S. State Department to brand Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini condemned the action, saying “putting armed forces of the UN member countries on the list of terrorist groups is a strange and unprecedented act which lacks any value or credit.”

Washington, however, has accused Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program. Iran has denied the U.S. charges and insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

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Increasingly serious situation could turn into another Iraq or Yugoslavia

Growing unrest and mass street demonstrations across Myanmar could herald an extremely dangerous period for the nation formerly known as Burma.

Military-ruled Myanmar is extremely difficult to enter and bans foreign journalists. This writer has managed to get into Myanmar three times. On the last, I was told the secret police were actually conducting bed checks in people’s homes in the capital to ensure no trouble-makers from the rebellious northern states were in town.

On a second visit, I eluded the secret police and got to see the nation’s Nobel prize-winning democratic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi in her home in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, where she has been under house arrest for 17 years.

The crisis in Myanmar seems a simple morality drama. The saintly Suu Kyi is held like a bird in a cage by a junta of brutal, wicked generals, who until recently called themselves the State Law and Order Council, or SLORC. In 1988, the junta’s soldiers crushed student demonstrations, killing 3,000. After Suu Kyi’s party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections, the generals annulled the vote and declared martial law.

This week President George W. Bush and other western nations called for even tighter sanctions against Myanmar’s junta and urged its replacement with democratic government.

Myanmar, in-deed, is a nasty police state. Its generals have plundered resources and kept this magnificent nation in direst poverty. Myanmar is often called a “jewel” and “unspoiled Asia of 1940s.” True enough. But that’s because the junta and its predecessor, mad dictator, Gen. Ne Win, turned Burma into a weird, hermit kingdom.

But extreme caution is advised in dealing with Myanmar. If things go wrong there, it could turn into an Asian version of Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan.

50 YEARS

Myanmar has been at war for 50 years with 17 ethnic rebel groups seeking secession from the former 14-state Union of Burma created by Imperial Britain, godfather of many of the world’s worst current problems.

Burmans, of Tibetan origin, form 68% of the population of 57 million. But there are other important, well-defined, independence-minded ethnic groups: Shan, the largely Christian Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon, Wa, Rakhine, Anglo-Burmese, and Chinese.

The largest, Shan, with its Shan State Army, are ethnically close to neighbouring Thailand, and in cahoots with the Thai military. Each major ethnic group has its own army and finances itself through smuggling timber, jewels, arms, and drugs.

The military juntas in Rangoon, and their 500,000-member armed forces, known as Tatmadaw, battled these secessionists for decades until the current junta managed to establish uneasy ceasefires with the major rebel groups.

If the junta were to be replaced by a democratic civilian government led by the gentle Suu Kyi, and military repression ended, it is highly likely Myanmar’s ethnic rebellions would quickly re-ignite. The only force holding Myanmar together is the military and secret police.

Shan, Karen, Kachin, and Mon still demand their own independent nations. Myanmar’s powerful neighbours — India, China and Thailand — have their eye on this potentially resource-rich nation.

China exercises strong influence over Myanmar and is building a naval base near Rangoon to give direct access for the first time to the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean.

India sees rival China threatening its rebellion-plagued eastern hill states along the Burmese border, and is increasingly alarmed by Chinese naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean.

NEIGHBOURING INTERESTS

A new democratic government in Yangon-Rangoon that is not tough enough to deal with secessionist regions around its troubled periphery could see Burma fall into internal turmoil and also invite intervention by covetous neighbours.

At worst, India and China could even clash head-on over control of strategic Burma, a threat identified in my book on Asian geopolitics and Indian-Chinese rivalry, War at the Top of the World.

So the West should tread with great caution in Myanmar. The West and Asia must exercise great care they do not exchange military dictatorship for ethnic strife and regional conflict.

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Shame has vanished from Western “civilization.” Hypocrisy has taken its place.

On September 28, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown could be heard on National Public Radio decrying the use of violence against democratic protesters by the government in Burma. Brown declared the British people’s revulsion over the violence inflicted by the Burmese government on its people.

But Brown said nothing about the violence the British government was inflicting on Iraqis and Afghans.

George W. Bush also struck the blameless pose when he declared: “The world is watching the people of Burma take to the streets to demand their freedom, and the American people stand in solidarity with these brave individuals.” [Junta Restricts Protesters, Communications in Burma, By Edward Cody, Washington Post September 29, 2007]

Bush and Brown do not have the same sympathy for the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither Bush nor Brown stands in solidarity with those who are demanding their freedom from foreign occupation by American and British troops. Indeed, Bush and Brown, as commanders in chief, are on a killing spree that makes the government in Burma look extremely restrained by comparison.

Why were British soldiers sent to kill Iraqis and Afghans? September 11 had nothing whatsoever to do with the UK. No doubt but that the corrupt Tony Blair was paid off to drag the British people into Bush’s Middle East war for American/Israeli hegemony, but Brown has done nothing to terminate Bush’s use of the British military as mercenaries.

The NPR announcers also supported the Burmese people, but they, too, show little disturbance over Bush’s five-year old wars that we now know were based entirely on lies. Al Qaeda is not the Taliban, and Iraq had no WMD. Neither country was a threat to the US. Now that we know this, why does the media still give Bush and Brown a free pass to use violence against Iraqis and Afghans?

To cut to the chase, what is the difference between Bush and Brown on one hand and the murderous Burmese government on the other? Bush and Brown are actually worse. They pretend to be democrats concerned with what people actually want. The Burmese government doesn’t pretend to be anything but a military dictatorship. Moreover, the Burmese government is clean by comparison as it hasn’t committed acts of naked aggression—war crimes under the Nuremberg standard—by invading other countries and attempting to occupy them.

Despite all the killing Bush has accomplished, he thirsts for yet more blood. Iran is in his and Israel’s sights.

All indications are that Bush is going to attack Iran. Propaganda, demonizations, and crass lies are pouring out of the Bush regime and its media and academic propagandists such as Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. Both parties in Congress have lined up behind the coming attack on Iran. The despicable senator Joe Lieberman even snuck language into a bill to give Bush the go ahead.

Who is going to stop Bush from a third war crime? Not his vice president, Not his national security adviser, not his secretary of defense. Not his secretary of state. Not Congress. Not the US military. Not the corporate fat cats. Not the Israel Lobby. Not the bought and paid for “allies.” Not the anti-war movement. Not the American people. Certainly not the media.

Americans are content with whatever crimes their government commits as long as the justification is Americans’ safety.

Americans’ willingness to murder others out of fear for their own safety is a result of September 11. The antiwar movement is impotent, because it has accepted the government’s 9/11 story. To oppose a war when you accept the government’s reason for the war is an indefensible position.

The Bush regime knows that if people will believe its 9/11 story, they will believe anything. Propaganda silences facts, and Americans fall for one set of falsehoods after another. The alleged 9/11 hijackers all came from countries allied with the US, principally Saudi Arabia, but Americans believe the government’s lies that Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria are responsible. Americans have been convinced that without “regime change” in these countries, the American superpower will remain helpless in face of stateless Muslims armed with box cutters.

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that Muslims hate us for our “freedom and democracy,” whereas in fact the problem is the US government’s immoral foreign policy and interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries. Bush’s message to the Middle East is clear: Be a puppet state or be destroyed.

In the meantime, to prevent democracy and civil liberties from getting in the way of making Americans safe, Bush has set aside habeas corpus, due process, right to legal representation, privacy, and the separation of powers mandated by the US Constitution. Otherwise, Bush says, we will lose the “war on terror.”

Bush says he has made Americans safe by ridding them of these constitutional impediments to their safety. And once American bombs fall on Iran and Syria, those countries will be free and democratic, too, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

In leading Americans to this conclusion, Bush has sunk the United States to a new low in human intelligence and morality.

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On Monday 8 October the Stop the War Coalition will be marching from Trafalgar Square to Parliament calling for all troops in Iraq to be brought home immediately.

After a series of relatively co-operative meetings, the police now say they have been instructed not to allow the march to take place and that all demonstrations are banned within a mile of Parliament whilst in session.

This is a new development which threatens our democratic rights. When Gordon Brown became prime minister he promised to liberalise the laws on protest, saying that one of his principles would be, “civil liberties safeguarded and enhanced”. Government ministers,
including Gordon Brown, have lined up to support the right to protest in Burma. It is important that these same ministers also defend the rights of people in this country to protest peacefully.

We are determined to march to make our views known to parliament on 8 October, when Gordon Brown will make his long awaited statement on Iraq. We urge everyone who opposes the war policies of our government to join the call for all British troops to come
home immediately and to help defend our civil liberties now under attack. We have produced a petition calling on the authorities to review the decision to ban the march.

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After retiring as the Federal Reserve’s second longest ever serving chairman, Alan Greenspan is now cashing in big late in life at age 81. He chaired the Fed’s Board of Governors from the time he was appointed in August, 1987 to when he stepped down January 31, 2006 amidst a hail of ill-deserved praise for his stewardship during good and perilous times. USA Today noted “the onetime jazz band musician went out on a high note.” The Wall Street Journal said “his economic legacy (rests on results) and seems secure.” The Washington Post cited his “nearly mythical status.”

Stanford Washington Research Group chief strategist Greg Valliere called him a “giant,” and Bob Woodward called him “Maestro” in his cloying hagiography (now priced $1.99 used on Alibris and $2.19 on Amazon) that was published in 2000 as the Greenspan-built house of cards was collapsing. The book was an adoring tribute to a man he called a symbol of American economic preeminence, who the Financial Times also praised as “An Activist Unafraid to Depart From the Rule” – by taking from the public and giving to the rich.

Others joined the chorus, too, lauding his steady, disciplined hand on the monetary steering wheel, his success keeping inflation and unemployment low, and his having represented the embodiment of prosperity in compiling a record of achievement his successor will be hard-pressed to match.

In 2004, William Greider in The Nation magazine had a different view. He’s the author of “Secrets of the Temple” on “how the Federal Reserve runs the country.” He wrote Greenspan “ranks among the most duplicitous figures to serve in modern American government (who used) his exalted status as economic wizard (to) regularly corrupt the political dialogue by sowing outrageously false impressions among gullible members of Congress and adoring financial reporters.”

They were front and center in the New York Times for the man who “steer(ed) the economy through multiple calamities and ultimately….one of the longest economic booms in history….(He earned his bona fides) weather(ing) the Black Monday stock crash of 1987 (and in 18 and a half years in office) achieved more celebrity than most rock stars” and may now approach them in earnings.

The new book of his memoirs “The Age of Turbulence” is just out for which his reported advance exceeded $8.5 million (second only to Bill Clinton’s $10 for his memoirs) plus additional royalties if sales exceed 1.9 million copies. They may given the amount of high-impact publicity it and he are getting nonstop. And that’s not all. He’s in great demand on the lecture circuit at six figure fees, has his own consulting firm, Greenspan Associates LLC, and his lawyer, Robert Barnett says “virtually every major investment-banking firm” in the world wants to hire him for his rainmaking connections.

They have value, not his market advice, best avoided for the man who engineered the largest ever stock market bubble and bust in history through incompetence, timidity, dereliction of duty, and subservience to the capital interests he represented at the expense of the greater good and a sustained sound economy he didn’t worry about nor did Wall Street.

For firms on the Street and big banks, he could do no wrong and was above reproach for letting them cash in big and then get plenty of advance warning when to exit. Most ordinary investors weren’t so fortunate. They’re not insiders and were caught flat-footed by advice from market pundit fraudsters and the most influential one of all in the Fed Chairman. Just weeks before the market peak in January, 2000, he claimed “the American economy was experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which propelled forward productivity, output, corporate profits and stock prices at a pace not seen in generations, if ever.”

It was hype and nonsense and on a par with famed economist and professor Irving Fisher’s remarks just before the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression when he claimed economic fundamentals in the country were strong, stocks undervalued, and an unending period of prosperity lay ahead. It took a world war a decade later, not market magic, for them to arrive, but before it did Fisher kept insisting in the early 1930s recovery was just around the corner. It’s the same way Wall Street touts operate today on gullible investors who even after they’ve been had are easy prey again for the next con.

And they’re really in trouble when it comes from the “Maestro,” who at the height of the stock market bubble said: “Lofty equity prices have reduced the cost of capital. The result has been a veritable explosion of spending on high-tech equipment…And I see nothing to suggest that these opportunities will peter out anytime soon….Indeed many argue that the pace of innovation will continue to quicken….to exploit the still largely untapped potential for e-commerce, especially the business-to-business arena.”

One week later, the Nasdaq peaked at 5048 and crashed to a low of 1114 on October 9, 2002. It lost 78% of its value, the S&P 500 stock index dropped 49%, and retail investors lost out while Greenspan was busy engineering another bubble with a tsunami of easy money for Wall Street and big investors. It’s now unwinding as he gets a big payday for his memoirs and a chance to rewrite history. He aims to raise himself to sainthood and at the same time distance himself from the very costly policies he implemented on top of trillions he helped scam in the greatest modern era wealth transfer from the public to the rich. More on that below.

Greenspan’s Background and Tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman

Alan Greenspan grew up in New York, got his B.A. and M.A. in economics from New York University and later was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia without completing a dissertation the degree usually requires. In a highly unusual move, Columbia made an exception in his case.

Early on, he became enamored with free market ideologue Ayn Rand, wrote for her newsletters and authored three essays for her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” It expressed her views on capitalism’s “moral aspects” and her attempt (with Greenspan’s help) to rescue it from its “alleged champions who are responsible for the fact that capitalism is being destroyed without a hearing (or) trial, without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning.”

That was in 1966 when Rand, a staunch libertarian as is Greenspan, believed fundamentalist capitalism was being battered by a flood of altruism in the wake of New Deal and Great Society programs she (and Greenspan) abhorred. She defended big business, made excuses for its wars, and denounced the student rebellion at the time and the evils of altruism. Greenspan concurred, maintained a 20 year association with Rand (who died in 1982), and never looked back.

From 1948 until his 1987 Federal Reserve appointment, he served as Richard Nixon’s domestic policy coordinator in his 1968 nomination campaign and later as Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers Chairman. He also headed the economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Company, from 1955 – 1987. Its forecasting record was so poor it was about to be liquidated when he left to join the Fed. A former competitor, Pierre Renfret, noted: “When Greenspan closed down his economic consulting business to (become Fed Chairman) he did so because he had no clients left and the business was going under (and we found) out he had none (of his employees left).” That made him Reagan’s perfect Fed Chairman choice, and Renfret added it was Greenspan’s failure in private business that got him into government service in the first place.

He wouldn’t disappoint as Wall Street’s man from the start. He bailed it out in 1987 after the disastrous October black Monday. It was the same way he did in it later in 1998 following Long Term Capital Management’s collapse and again after the dot-com bubble burst. It was by his favorite monetary medicine guaranteed to work when taken as directed – floods of easy money followed by still more until the patient is healed, unmindful that the cure may be worse than the disease. No matter, it’s a new Chairman’s problem with Greenspan claiming no culpability for his 18 and a half year tenure of misdeeds, subservience to capital, and contempt for the public interest.

His new book claims the opposite. It’s a breathtaking example of historical revisionism that’s become standard practice for the man Sydney Morning News’ Political and International Editor Peter Hartcher calls “Bubble Man” in his new book by that title. In it, he quotes Bob Woodward saying Greenspan “believed he had done all he could” to contain over-exuberance when, in fact, he let it get out of control. He now claims:

— he didn’t support George Bush’s regressive tax cuts for the rich (that helped create huge budget deficits). In fact, he did, and in 2001 wholeheartedly endorsed this centerpiece of the administration’s economic policy in his testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. At the time, he cited the economic slowdown saying: “Should current economic weakness spread….having a tax cut….may….do noticeable good.”

— he’s “saddened (in his book) that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” In his typical obfuscating way to confuse and have things both ways, he tried clarifying his position in a September interview claiming: “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive. I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, are we fortunate in taking out Saddam? I would say it was essential.” He failed to say he supported the Bush administration agenda across the board, including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, with reasons given at the time he’s now distancing himself from.

— no responsibility for the 2000 stock market bubble. He falsely claimed he never saw it coming while providing generous amounts of liquidity to fuel it. After citing the market’s “irrational exuberance” in a December, 1996 speech, he failed to curb it and could have by raising interest rates, margin requirements, and jawboning investors to cool an overheated market to restore stability for long-term economic growth. Instead, he did nothing. He failed to take away the punch bowl, created a bubble, and allowed it to burst causing investors (mostly retail ones) to lose trillions.

— no responsibility for the housing and bond bubbles he created by cutting interest rates aggressively to 1% and flooding the markets with liquidity. As things got out of hand, timely responsible action could have avoided the summer, 2007 credit crisis. Again, he allowed a bad situation to get worse to keep the party going and allow lenders to profit hugely. In the unprecedented run-up in house prices to an $8 trillion wealth bubble, he derided critics claiming anything was wrong. He even encouraged homebuyers to take out adjustable rate mortgages, approved of very risky no down payment purchases, created the subprime mess as a consequence, and isn’t around to address buyers faced with $1.2 trillion in mortgage resets later this year and next that will cause many thousands of painful foreclosures.

Affected homeowners won’t likely be cheered by his speech-making bunkum that bubble level asset prices proved his monetary policies worked by getting investors to demand lower risk premiums. They also won’t be calmed by his arrogant claim that it’s “simply not realistic” to expect the Fed to identify and deflate asset bubbles when it’s real role is to champion flexible and unregulated markets leaving everyone unprotected on our own.

— no responsibility for allowing outstanding US debt to more than triple to around $40 trillion on his watch that one analyst calls his “most conspicuous achievement.” Those having to pay it off won’t thank him.

Greenspan’s Role in the Greatest Modern Era Wealth Transfer from the Public to the Rich

Greenspan was a one-man wrecking crew years before he became Fed Chairman, and his earlier role likely sealed the job for him as a man the power elite could trust. He earned his stripes and then some for his role in charge of the National Commission on Social Security Reform (called the Greenspan Commission). He was appointed by Ronald Reagan to chair it in 1981 to study and recommend actions to deal with “the short-term financing crisis that Social Security faced….(with claims the) Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund would run out of money….as early as August, 1983.”

There was just one problem. It was a hoax, but who’d know as the dominant media stayed silent. They let the Commission do its work that would end up transfering trillions of public dollars to the rich. It represents one of the greatest ever heists in plain sight, still ongoing and greater than ever, with no one crying foul to stop it. The Commission issued its report in January, 1983, and Congress used it as the basis for the 1983 Social Security Amendments to “resolve short-term financing problem(s) and (make) many other significant changes in Social Security law” with the public none the wiser it was a scam harming them.

The Commission recommended:

— Social Security remain government funded and not become a voluntary program (that would have killed it);

— $150 – 200 billion in either additional income or decreased outgo be provided the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds in calendar years 1983 – 89;

— the actuarial imbalance for the 75 year Trust Funds valuation period of an average 1.80% of taxable payroll be resolved;

— a “consensus package” to fix the problem by raising payroll taxes on incomes but exempting the rich beyond a maximum level taxed. Also a gradual increase in the retirement age and various other possible short and longer range options for consideration. The result today is low income earners pay more in payroll than income tax. For bottom level earners, the burden is especially onerous. They pay no income tax but aren’t exempt from 6.2% of their wages going for Social Security and Medicare.

— coverage under OASDI be extended on a mandatory, basis as of January 1, 1984, to all newly hired civilian employees of the federal government and all employees of nonprofit organizations;

— state and local governments that elected coverage for their employees under the OASDI-HI program not be allowed to terminate it in the future;

— the method of computing benefits be revised to exclude benefits that can accrue to individuals from non-covered OASDI employment and only be for the period when they became eligible – to eliminate “windfall” benefits;

— 50% of OASDI benefits should henceforth be taxable as ordinary income for individuals earning $20,000 or more and married couples $25,000 or more;

— in addition, other recommendations concerning cost of living adjustments, the law pertaining to surviving spouses who remarry after age 60, divorced spouses, disabled widows and widowers, and for scheduled payroll tax increases to move up to earlier years up to 1990 after which no further change be made with the wage base rising and is now at a level of $97,500 in 2007 at a tax rate of 6.2% matched by employers;

— self-employed persons beginning in 1984 pay the combined employer-employee rates now at 12.4% with half considered a business expense;

— in addition, a number of other changes recommended that in total would penalize the public to benefit the most well-off that was the whole idea of the scheme in the first place.

The public was told the Commission recommendations of 1983 were supposed to make Social Security fiscally sound for the next 75 years. They weren’t told there was no problem to fix and the changes enacted were to transfer massive wealth from the public to the rich. It was one part of an overall Reagan administration scheme that included huge individual and corporate tax cuts that took place from 1981 to 1986. The rich benefitted most with top rates dropping from 70% in 1981 to 50% over three years and then to 28% in 1986 while the bottom rate actually rose from 11 to 15%.

It was the first time US income tax rates were ever reduced at the top and raised at the bottom simultaneously. But it was far worse than that. In only a few years, Reagan got enacted the largest ever US income tax cut (mostly for the rich) while instituting the greatest ever increase entirely against working Americans earning $30,000 or less.

Alan Greenspan engineered it for him by supporting income tax cuts and doubling the payroll tax to defray the revenue shortfall. He also recommended raiding the Social Security Trust Fund to offset the deficit, and who’d know the difference. His scheme helped make the US tax code hugely regressive as well as for the first time transform a pay-as-you-go retirement and disability benefits program into one where wage earner contributions subsidize the rich as well as support current beneficiaries.

As a consequence, the wealth gap widened, continued under Clinton but became unprecedented under George W. Bush with Greenspan at it again. He supported the administration’s wealth transfer scheme to the rich and outsized corporate subsidies with the public getting stuck with out-of-control deficits, deep social service cuts, and a new Treasury Department report just out promising more of the same.

It claims Social Security faces a $13.6 trillion shortfall “over the indefinite future,” “reforms” are needed, delaying them punishes younger workers, and the program “can be made permanently solvent only by reducing the present value of scheduled benefits and/or increasing the present value of scheduled tax increases.” Translation: cut benefits deeply, raise payroll taxes, and privatize Social Security so more public wealth goes to Wall Street and big investors.

Already the top 1% owns 40% of global assets; the top 10% 85% of them; the top 1% in the US controls one-third of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80% just 15.3%; and the top 20% 84.7%. In contrast, the poorest 20% are in debt, owe more than they own, and it’s getting worse.

A generation of financial manipulation devastated working Americans, but it’s even worse than that. Added are the effects of globalization, automation, outsourcing, the shift from manufacturing to services, deregulation, other harmful economic factors plus weak unions just gotten far weaker in the wake of the UAW September membership sellout to General Motors. The tentative agreement reached (for members to vote on) amounted to an unconditional surrender by a corrupted leadership after a two day walkout that was likely orchestrated in advance to cause GM the least pain. If the package is approved as is likely, it will encourage other companies to offer similar deals, take it or leave it. Organized labor suffered another grievous blow, corporate giants gained, and are more empowered than ever to win out at the expense of workers’ futures.

The whole scheme was kick-started under Ronald Reagan. Between his tax cuts for the rich and the Greenspan Commission’s orchestrated Social Security heist, working Americans lost out in a generational wealth transfer shift now exceeding $1 trillion annually from 90 million working class households to for-profit corporations and the richest 1% of the population. It created an unprecedented wealth disparity that continues to grow, shames the nation and is destroying the bedrock middle class without which democracy can’t survive.

Greenspan helped orchestrate it with economist Ravi Batra calling his economics “Greenomics” in his 2005 book “Greenspan’s Fraud.” It “turns out to be Greedomics” advocating anti-trust laws, regulations and social services be ended so “nothing….interfere(s) with business greed and the pursuit of profits.”

It won’t affect the “Maestro.” He’s getting by quite nicely on his six figure retirement income that’s just a drop in the bucket supplementing the millions he’s making as payback for the trillions he helped shift to the rich and super-rich. They take care of their own, and Greenspan is one of them.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at http://www.sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

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Interview With Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh: “The President Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing”
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way in telling the story of what’s really going on in Iraq and Iran. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke to him about America’s Hitler, Bush’s Vietnam, and how the US press failed the First Amendment. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear program in Iran?

Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it’s been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what (IAEA head Mohamed) ElBaradei and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA’s best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they’ve been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn’t enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to the Iraq War?

Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we’ve had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he’s not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has with Iran come from?

Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That’s just their game.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What interest does the White House have in moving us to the brink with Tehran?

Hersh: You have to ask yourself what interest we had 40 years ago for going to war in Vietnam. You’d think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can’t possibly do the same dumb thing again. I have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Even after Iraq? Aren’t there strategic reasons for getting so deeply involved in the Middle East?

Hersh: Oh no. We’re going to build democracy. The real thing in the mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can’t have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I’d actually be relieved because I’d know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he’s doing God’s work.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the options in Iraq?

Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House listening?

Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the “Surge” (eds. The “Surge” refers to President Bush’s commitment of 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the spring of 2007 in an attempt to improve security in the country.) as if it’s going to unite the country. But the Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We’ve basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of the Shiites are gone. They’ve simply split.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?

Hersh: I think that’s a much better reason than the fact that there are a couple more soldiers on the ground.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the lessons of the Surge?

Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he’s talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He’s not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You’re going to have a Kurdistan. You’re going to have a Sunni area that we’re going to have to support forever. And you’re going to have the Shiites in the South.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?

Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and doesn’t know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys now don’t care. They see it but they don’t care.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the Iraq war does end up as a defeat for the US, will it leave as deep a wound as the Vietnam War did?

Hersh: Much worse. Vietnam was a tactical mistake. This is strategic. How do you repair damages with whole cultures? On the home front, though, we’ll rationalize it away. Don’t worry about that. Again, there’s no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We’ll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of course, preventing that is partially the job of the media. Have reporters been doing a better job recently than they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?

Hersh: Oh yeah. They’ve done a better job since. But back then, they blew it. When you have a guy like Bush who’s going to move the infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he’s going to put everybody in jeopardy and he’s secretive and he doesn’t tell Congress anything and he’s inured to what we write. In such a case, we (journalists) become more important. The First Amendment failed and the American press failed the Constitution. We were jingoistic. And that was a terrible failing. I’m asked the question all the time: What happened to my old paper, the New York Times? And I now say, they stink. They missed it. They missed the biggest story of the time and they’re going to have to live with it.FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.

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